Survey ranks AU economics professors among most productive in nation

AUBURN – Economics faculty at Auburn University achieved high rankings in a newly published study in the Southern Economic Journal that examined research productivity and impact in the area of economic education from 1991-2005.

Economics departments were ranked on total citations and citations per author. Auburn ranked 14th, just ahead of such noted institutions as Princeton and the University of Toronto. The top three ranking universities for research in this discipline were Vanderbilt, Indiana and Wisconsin.

The study also reported the top 50 individual faculty members in the world, ranked on research productivity in this area. John Siegfried of Vanderbilt and William Becker of Indiana University were the most highly cited individual researchers. Steven Caudill and Daniel Gropper of Auburn were tied for 12th with Peter Kennedy of Simon Fraser University and Charles Holt of the University of Virginia. The study reports 14 Auburn-affiliated authors publishing research in this area; citations to Caudill and Gropper’s work accounted for 77 percent of the total citations that Auburn researchers received.

AU College of Business Dean Paul Bobrowski said the rankings indicate the quality of the Department of Economics and the college in which it is housed. “Economics is an extremely important part of a business education, and this study provides evidence of the strong contributions that Professors Caudill and Gropper have made in advancing the department and the College of Business in their teaching and research activities,” Bobrowski added.

Caudill, chair of the Department of Economics, is also the college’s Regions Bank Professor of Economics. Gropper, a professor of economics, is associate dean for MBA Programs.

The study, “Ranking Economics Journals, Economics Departments and Economists Using Teaching-Focused Research Productivity,” appears in the January issue of the Southern Economic Journal. The authors are Melody Lo of the University of Texas at San Antonio, Sunny Wong of the University of San Francisco and Franklin Mixon, previously at the University of Southern Mississippi and now a visiting professor at Auburn.